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Delving into the spatial revolution ushered in by aviation in the early twentieth century, this conference aims to explore the aesthetic and political implications of aerial vision, and to analyse how various aerial technologies - from airplanes to satellites, from spacecraft to drones and digital mapping systems such as Google Earth and Google Maps - have influenced urban planning, architecture and land management, transforming the way we perceive and understand the underlying world we live in through its images.
The various technological transformations of verticality have had a significant impact on the way we construct and think about the environment and society. On the other hand, the development of aerial technology has gradually changed our understanding of geographical and geopolitical dynamics, producing a scientific, rational and calculable space. A phenomenon that extends to the various forms of remote viewing, which redefine the very concept of distance and thus our relationship to the earth as a surface to be visualized and represented.
How do the images produced by aerial technologies shape our understanding of space, environment and territory?
And how do these transformations influence political action?
How are aerial images and technologies agents of subjectivation?
What kind of urban subjects does aerial vision produce?
What are the political imaginaries and epistemic frameworks they convey?
What is their claim to truth? And how have concepts of distance and legibility, or the notion of scale, changed since the conquest of the air?
What political considerations arise from the use of aerial technologies in public space?
How does the dialectic between sky and earth, the view from above and the view from below change according to the aerial technologies used?
What does it mean to be observed from above? And what strategies of resistance (political or artistic) have been mobilized to escape this regime of hypervisibility?
What are the technical operations associated with this new scopic regime?
Program
Thursday, 28.08.2025
Institutional greetings and introduction to the Conference
Riccardo Blumer's bio
Graduated in Architecture at Milan Polytechnic in 1986, Riccardo Blumer trained at Mario Botta's studio. Professionally active since the 1990s, he has created numerous buildings, exhibition setups, and furnishings, both private and public. His design products have received prestigious awards, and some projects are part of the permanent collections of museums. Numerous publications document his work in various fields.
He works in a group known as Blumerandfriends, a context in which he has developed the "physical exercises of design and architecture"—permanent and temporary installations, educational exercises, conferences, and seminars. Currently a full professor and former four-year director of the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio at the University of Italian Switzerland, Riccardo Blumer continues his research between construction and the public meaning of artifice on various fronts.
Christoph Frank's bio
Graduated in History of Art and History of the Classical Tradition from the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes of the University of London. From 1994 until 2006 he was responsible for the department of art history at the Forschungszentrum Europäische Aufklärung at Potsdam and was at the same time Lehrbeauftragter at the Institute of Art History of the Technische Universität in Berlin. From 2000 until 2002 he held Max-Planck-Research-Fellowship at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. In 2005 he was Research Associate at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris and at Columbia University of New York. In his recent publications he has dealt with European art and architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the history of collecting in Germany and Russia, the impact of agents and correspondents of art and architecture, and the art theory of Denis Diderot and Friedrich Melchior Grimm.
Matteo Vegetti's bio
Matteo Vegetti is professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Space at the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio and professor at Supsi (DACD) of Theories of Space. He is also a member of the Master in Geopolitics at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is principal investigator of the SNF Synergy research project entitled Aerial Spatial Revolution. The conquest of the air and its impact on city, architecture and territory from the origins of aviation to present time. For many years he was lecturer of Aesthetics at the Politecnico di Milano and from 2019 to 2022 he was visiting professor at the University of Bergamo. Among his works: La fine della storia (Milan 2000), Hegel e i confini dell'Occidente (Naples 2004), Lessico socio-filosofico della città (Varese 2005), Filosofie della metropoli (Ed., Rome, 2009), L'invenzione del globo (Turin 2017), The Global Spatial Revolution (Milan 2022), Earthscapes. Le conseguenze della visione della Terra dal spazio (Ed., with T. Morawsky, Rome, 2023), Corpo, spazio, architettura. Fenomenologia dell’esperienza spaziale (Ed., with F. Bandi, Brescia 2024).
The Satellite Coast: Vandenberg Space Force Base, SpaceX, and Materialities of Aerospace
Bio
Lisa Parks, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara where she directs the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab. Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and her research focuses on four areas: satellite technologies and globalization; critical studies of media infrastructures; and media, militarization, and surveillance; and environmental media. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke U Press, 2005) and Rethinking Media Coverage: Vertical Mediation and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2018), and is co-editor of the books: Media Backends: Digital Infrastructures and Sociotechnical Relations (U of Illinois Press, 2023) Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke U Press, 2017), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (U of Illinois Press, 2015), Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers U Press, 2012), and Planet TV: A Global Television Reader (NYU Press, 2003). Parks also has published dozens of journal articles and book chapters and co-edits the History of Media and Communication book series for the University of Illinois Press. She has held visiting appointments at the IKKM at Bauhaus University in Weimar, the Institute for Advanced Study or Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, McGill University, University of Southern California, and the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, among others. She has been a PI or co-PI on major research grants from the National Science Foundation, the US State Department, and Mellon Foundation, and has collaborated with artists, computer scientists, sociologists, and geographers.
From 2016-2020 Parks was Professor of Comparative Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Abstract
This lecture explores the material effects of intensified commercial satellite launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base on the central coast of California during the past ten years. The “satellite coast” is conceptualized as a zone of technological, economic, and socio-cultural activity where agriculture, aerospace, and prison industries converge on the traditional lands of Indigenous Chumash communities. This is an area inhabited by generations of fishermen, fruit pickers, and ranchers, military personnel and space engineers, housing developers and incarcerated persons. It is a zone of skyward trajectories, speculative futures, and broken promises. Drawing on preliminary fieldwork and collaborative work in progress, the presentation will explore conditions faced by communities who work and live adjacent to satellite launch complexes, including environmental and public health-related concerns caused by noise and emissions, impacts on cultural resources and spiritual practices of communities indigenous to the area, and socio-economic effects on nearby towns. The research is focused on understanding the local effects of global satellite constellations that are owned and operated by US private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, and is funded by a grant from the US National Science Foundation.
Chair: Lisa Henicz
Aero-Neo-Colonial Infrastructure: Emergencies, Crisis and an Aeromobile Mantle of Safety
Bio
Peter Adey is Professor of Human Geography at Monash University. He researches mobility through the cultures, geopolitics of security, and aesthetic life of movement and migration. His interests have orbited around air-travel mobilities and new technologies, the climate emergency and just transitions, and climates of emergency in the atmospheres, mobilities, and social and cultural ruptures of conflict and crisis. He has led or collaborated on research projects spanning the social sciences, humanities, and arts, most recently in an international consortium developing the mobility humanities. He is the author and editor of over ten books; his latest is Evacuation: The Politics and Aesthetics of Movement in Emergency (2024, Duke University Press)
Abstract
In this paper I draw from an emergent aerial infrastructure of evacuative mobilities, born in the counter and exclusive circuits of settler-colonial remote medical care to provide a ‘mantle of safety’ to the Australian ‘inland’, in order to project forward to the burgeoning role of aeromobilities, airport and logistics developments within humanitarian crisis and emergencies today. I argue that Australia’s early provision of aerial medical care constituted not only a particular form of settler-colonialism but a particular infrastructural technique that made possible its pursuit, with white-nationalist underpinnings. Circuits of evacuative mobility under the logics of supporting the settler-state promised the hope of both projection and an assurance of return (Ruiz 2021) – often supported by numerous affective and emotional constructions: such as relief, consolation and reassurance. This history is suggestive of a future-present through which post- and neo-colonial territorial expansions take form through state and corporate provisions of aerial and logistics infrastructural platforms in order to provide aid and assistance to crisis and emergency settings.
Chair: Lisa Henicz
The Wild Blue Yonder: The Atmospheric Politics of Aerial Commons
Bio
Caren Kaplan is Professor Emerita of American Studies at UC Davis. Her research draws on cultural geography, landscape art, and military history to explore the ways in which undeclared as well as declared wars produce representational practices of atmospheric politics. Recent publications include Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Duke 2018) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (Duke 2017).
Abstract
Aerial commons can engage and even intercede in the militarized and highly regulated airspaces above our heads. Everyday citizens create and work with airspaces for fun, for art, for small-scale science projects, as well as for protests and political actions like counter mapping projects in east Jerusalem that use kites, “art” installations that deploy stationary aerostats on the US-Mexico border to restore indigenous land claims and refute the fiction of borders, or balloonists in Brazil who evade police crack downs and shakedowns, or activists and protestors that “mod” off-the-shelf small drones. Operating against the idea of emptiness, waste, regulation, and weaponization, these aerial actions are not utopic sublimes and the actors are not romantic outlaws (or, not only…). These and many other examples demonstrate creative engagements with an element—air—to make space for breath, art, experimentation, sustenance, political power, communication—that is, for community and for life itself.
Chair: Tommaso Morawski
Whither Planetary History? A Revolution beyond the Atmosphere
Bio
Alexander C.T. Geppert is a space and planetary historian, and a European history professor at New York University, jointly appointed by NYU New York and NYU Shanghai. He has held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, served as Eleanor Searle Visiting Professor at Caltech, and will be in residence at the Hanse Institute of Advanced Study throughout 2026. His book publications include a trilogy on European Astroculture, consisting of Imagining Outer Space (ed., 22018), Limiting Outer Space (ed., 22020), and Militarizing Outer Space (co-ed., 22023). Alexander Geppert is at work on two monographs, Astroculture: Europe in the Age of Space, and a sequel, Planetizing Earth: An Extra-Terrestrial History of the Global Present. He also hosts the ‘NYU Space Talks: History, Politics, Astroculture’ lecture series (www.space-talks.com).
Abstract
The expansion of the human sphere beyond Earth has larger repercussions for understanding the present than is commonly recognized. All too common is a flight back towards the atmosphere, which fails to distinguish between aerial and spatial politics. This talk, the collaborative effort of a historian and a philosopher, contours ‘planetary history’ as a novel field situated at the confluence of environmental, global and space history, with the aim of according greater prominence to the extra-terrestrial within terrestrial history. Planetizing history amounts to situating the horizons of inquiry in such a way as to emphasize the significance of space technology and global astroculture including earth photography, orbital infrastructures, space-based telescopes and the ongoing pursuit of identifying extraterrestrial intelligence. To planetize history, then, is to show that the history of the globalized present cannot be written from an exclusively terrestrial point of view. We contend that it is there, in outer space, where the planetary revolution occurred.
Chair: Tommaso Morawski
Differing and Unusual Orbits: Space Power Beyond the Vertical
Bio
Brad Tabas is a philosopher. His work attends to matters imagined unthinkable. He is interested in questions which haunt the margins of contemporary discourse, the uncertain boundaries between inside and outside, life and death, power and powerlessness. Ecology, technology, the weird, the extraterrestrial, and the spatial and gravitational vectors affecting the meaning of meaning are some of the threads which run through his writing. He is associate professor in the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the ENSTA (The École Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées) and a member of the laboratory Foap. He earned his degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and New York University (MA and Ph.D). His work has been widely published—in Telos, Cosmos and History, Terrain, Society + Space, and elsewhere.
Abstract
Discussions of aerospatial power have been strongly influenced by Virilio’s figure of the planetary “panopticon”. This surveillance architecture would (here quoting Stephen Graham) employ a “vertical,” “God-like” view to dominate the planet. But this paradigm fails to adequately spatialize the “differing and unusual orbits” which concern space strategists such as Paul Syzmanski. In effect, the more national power is fueled by space, the more space infrastructure becomes a known vulnerability, and the more inadequate verticality becomes as a critical paradigm for thinking about space power. As orbital space spaces the exercise of power, critics need to learn how to think outer space beyond the vertical. This talk will thus announce the death of the god’s eye view. It will contour an alternative post-planetary paradigm for thinking about space power. Starting with the notion of terrestrial bias, it will provide an archaology for the divinization of the global viewpoint, highlighting how its limits and dangers have been repressed even by supposedly critical thinkers. The talk will conclude by sketching four key critical notions—exorbitant realism, Earth-Space supplementarity, uneven extraterrestrial development, and astrocolonialism—which can us to think space power today.
Chair: Tommaso Morawski
Friday, 29.08.2025
Telearchics: Operation Crossroads and the Rise of Atmopower at the Dawn of the Drone Era
Bio
Lucrezia Pozzi obtained her master’s degree in Philosophical Sciences from the University of Milan with full marks and honors, completing a thesis in aesthetic philosophy under the guidance of Professor Andrea Pinotti. Currently, she is a PhD student at Academy of architecture and at University of Applied Science and Arts of Southern Switzerland within the project “Aerial Spatial Revolution”. Her research focuses on the impact of aerial technologies (drones, satellites, and rovers) in creating new spaces of military and political power at a distance, merging analyses of aesthetic philosophy, philosophy of technology, media theory and media archeology along with geopolitical considerations.
Abstract
The era of unmanned aerial vehicles has deep roots that trace back to the 1940s when the military operation Crossroads brought to the world's attention an exciting yet insidious possibility of space domination, representing the latest and most advanced phase of air power. This phase is defined by the geographer Burnet Hershey as “telearchics”, referring to the emerging power of remote manipulation by drones.
This presentation aims to explore this concept by tracing its theoretical origins to illuminate a trajectory that connects the past and present of the strategic power of UAVs, challenging the idea that the Gulf War was the inaugural moment of the rise of operational images and of their impact within political and military operations. From this perspective, it is suggested that it was Crossroads, with the nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, the military operation that opened the way to the era of the logistic of perception through unmanned aerial devices designed to extend the reach of actions into risky or inaccessible spaces, beyond human perceptual environments, leveraging models of atmospheric power and remote space domination through two fundamental human phenomenological dimensions: the haptic/tactile and the visual.
Chair: Lilian Kroth
Drone visuals and beyond: exploring the potential of volumetric, visual, and more-than-visual aerial sensing
Bio
Ole B. Jensen is Professor of Urban Theory and Urban Design at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark. He is a sociologist by background and his research interests are urban design, public space design, urban mobilities and technologies, and social inclusion/exclusion in cities. He is the Vice Head of Department for Research and the co-founder and vice-director of the Center for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS), Aalborg University. He is the author of amongst other books Staging Mobilities (Routledge, 2013), Designing Mobilities (Aalborg University Press, 2014), Mobilities Design. Urban designs for mobile situations (with Lanng, Routledge 2017), and Mobility Injustice by Design (Routledge, in press). He is the editor of The Handbook of Urban Mobilities ( with Lassen, Kaufmann, Freudendal-Pedersen and Lange, Routledge, 2020) and the four-volume collection Mobilities (in the series Critical Concepts in Built Environment, Routledge, 2015).
Abstract
This paper explores the transformative impact of drone technologies on urban design, surveillance, and spatial knowledge production. Through a theoretical framework centered on spatiality, technology, and embodiment, the study highlights how drone-enabled aerial vision reconfigures the “proximity-connectivity nexus,” stretching spatial situations and extending human perception. Drones act as “epistemology engines,” offering new modes of understanding territory beyond traditional ground-based perspectives.
Three empirical vignettes illustrate these dynamics. The first examines an urban design curriculum where students collaborate with technical staff to determine optimal drone footage—what I term the “politics of the sweet spot”—revealing tensions and synergies between embodied design intuition and algorithmic vision. The second vignette draws from various research projects that employ drones not only visually but with multi-sensory remote sensing (e.g., thermal or air quality sensors), advocating for a “volumetric ecology” that challenges the flatness of conventional maps. The third case addresses surveillance, arguing that drones introduce mobile, volumetric capacities that extend traditional surveillance paradigms beyond visual monitoring.
In conclusion, the paper reflects on the dual nature of drone technologies: as tools of surveillance and power, but also as instruments of liberation and civic engagement. It advocates for a critical, reflective approach to drone use in urban and research contexts.
Chair: Lilian Kroth
Policing with the Drone: Towards an Aerial Geopolitics of Security
Bio
Francisco Klauser is professor in political geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His work explores the socio-spatial implications, power and surveillance issues arising from the digitisation of present-day life. Research topics include video surveillance, mega-event security, smart cities, airport surveillance, and big data in agriculture. In recent years, this research agenda has been pushed further in an explicitly three-dimensional way, resulting in a wide-ranging portfolio of work into the volumetrics of space and power from an aerial and subterranean viewpoint. In particular, Francisco Klauser was the coordinator of a four‐year research project on civil drones, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and he has developed a strong research interest into the politics of the air in agriculture and in health politics, relating to the fight against COVID-19. His empirical and theoretical ambition to develop a properly “three-dimensional political geography” has also led to a continued research engagement with the subterranean geographies of re-affected Swiss military bunkers.
Abstract
The presentation explores in empirical detail the air-bound expectations, imaginations and practices arising from the acquisition of a new police drone in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. The study shows how drones are transforming the ways in which the aerial realm is lived as a context, object and perspective of policing. This tripartite structure is taken as a prism through which to advance novel understandings of the simultaneously elemental and affective, sensory, cognitive and practical dimensions of the aerial volumes within, on and through which drones act. The study of the ways in which these differing dimensions are bound together in how the police think about drones and what they do with them enables the development of an ‘aerial geopolitics of security’ that, from a security viewpoint, approaches interactions between power and space in a three-dimensional and cross-ontological way.
Chair: Lilian Kroth
Saturday, 30.08.2025
Proximate Indifference: the (spatial) phenomenology of aerial bordering
Bio
Lorenzo Pezzani is an architect and researcher. His work explores the spatial politics, visual cultures and political ecologies of migration and borders. Over more than a decade, as co-founder of projects such as Forensic Oceanography and Border Forensics, he has worked at the crossroad of academic research, the arts and non-governmental activism, bringing new interdisciplinary perspectives on pressing issues such as migration, border violence and the environmental crisis. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna, where he directs LIMINAL, a laboratory investigating intersectional (im-)mobilities through forensic imagination, and leads the "Hostile Environments" ERC project. His work has been used as evidence in courts of law, published across different media, and exhibited internationally.
Abstract
Since 2017, European authorities have increasingly relied on a vast network of aircraft to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Europe by boat and return them to widespread abuse and violent detention in Libya and Tunisia. In the summer of 2021, the European Border and Coast Guard agency Frontex added to this growing fleet an Israeli-built Heron drone, which has arguably become a cornerstone of its aerial surveillance operations. Building on ongoing research into Frontex aerial patrols, this presentation looks at processes of (de-)territorialisation engendered by aerial bordering as a useful entry point to understand the increasingly atmospheric qualities of contemporary borders. It centres the perspective of survivors of the treacherous crossing of the Mediterranean and their quasi-encounters with aerial patrols to rethink the spatial politics and affective dimensions of contemporary bordering practices. From a dinghy in the Mediterranean, the drone remains an ambiguous and elusive presence, often just barely audible and quick to disappear again into the skies. While literature emerging from the so-called “first age” of drone warfare has introduced the notion of “distant intimacy” to describe the experience of the drone operator, I suggest that, when observed from below and in the context of border control operations, the asymmetric relationship instituted by aerial surveillance is best understood as a form of proximate indifference. The latter, in turn, is central to the necropolitics of (active) abandonment that defines border violence in the central Mediterranean and beyond.
Chair: Claudia Nigrelli
The Airspace Tribunal and Topologies of Air: Art and Human Rights - Visualising Threat
Bio
Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist based in London, UK and a Professor of Art, Film and Media at the University of Kent. Informed by her long-term investigations into the dynamic processes of memory, amnesia and cultural erasure, her work examines the devastating impact of accelerating military, industrial and environmental transformations of airspace and outer space and the implications for human rights. She is co-founder of the Airspace Tribunal with human rights lawyer Nick Grief. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Topologies of Air at Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2025); Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie, Toulouse (2022-23), Bahrain National Museum, Manama (2022) and The Power Plant, Toronto (2022). Illingworth was a recipient of the Stanley Picker Fellowship and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2016). She is currently an Imperial War Museum Associate, Artist Fellow for the UKRI Polarities Network and sits on the international editorial boards of Digital War and Memory, Mind and Media. Topologies of Air – Shona Illingworth, Downey, A. (ed) was published by Sternberg Press and the Power Plant in 2022.
Abstract
Airspace and outer space are being rapidly transformed into an ever more complex and instrumentalised space of military and corporate exploitation, with increasingly pervasive and weaponised surveillance, inexorable expansion in aerial warfare, the deployment of unaccountable AI systems in lethal autonomous weapons, growing nuclear threat and unrelenting environmental degradation. This is subjecting global populations to new and complex forms of mass vulnerability and risk. However, the contemporary legal framework does not adequately protect people from these expanding airborne threats. This is also causing long-term, transgenerational trauma and psychological harm. Shona Illingworth will discuss her ongoing work on the Airspace Tribunal, an international people’s tribunal that she established with human rights lawyer Nick Grief in 2018 to consider the case for and against a proposed new human right to live without physical or psychological threat from above, and her interconnected body of artwork, Topologies of Air. She will explore how creative art practices can make visible and critically address the rapid transformation of airspace and outer space and the human and environmental impacts and discuss how the Airspace Tribunal challenges the traditional state-centric view of how international law is created through its collaborative work to develop the human rights dimension of airspace and outer space.
Chair: Claudia Nigrelli